E46 rebooted while driving.. Anyone seen this?

[rumatt]

My significant other just called. She was driving my car on the highway and said all of a sudden:

- The dials (speed and RPM) went to zero
- All the lights on the dash came on and it started beeping, like when you first turn the key to start the car
- By the time she pulled off the road, everything was back to normal.
- The engine never stopped or sputtered
- She turned off and restarted the car with no problems.
- The time is now reading "--:--" (or something, similar) as if the power went out.

Thoughts? (other than: "buy a new car you cheap POS")

[Plaz]

Does it have an ICELink?

[rumatt]

No ICElink, but I do have a phatbox with blitzsafe adaptor. I just googled and saw that some have claimed it can also make the electronics go crazy.

If it starts happening more, I'll unplug the phatbox (:cry:) an see what happens.

[bren]

I had to toss icelink a while ago after the car rejected 2 different modules.

[zcasavant]

This happened to my mother's old X5. I'm not sure if she had Icelink installed at that point, but it was definitely weird.

[rumatt]

What kind of car electrical design allows a frigging radio interface to screw with the central electronics..

Did they outsource this job to Microsoft or something?

[TD]

My E90 did something like this once - and it had no aftermarket electronics.

I posted about it at the time. But it never repeated the rest of the time I had the car (which was roughly another two years).

[zcasavant]

What kind of car electrical design allows a frigging radio interface to screw with the central electronics..

Did they outsource this job to Microsoft or something?

No clue, but the icelink did it and the DICE thing she got to replace the bad icelink did it as well. She's switched to the BMW iPod thingy now and it's much better.

[Terry Kennedy]

What kind of car electrical design allows a frigging radio interface to screw with the central electronics..
One that saves cost. The E39 had 2 identical buses and kept the "important" stuff (light control module, climate control, etc.) on one and put the entertainment stuff on the other, and the general module verified packets for the proper format and necessity to be repeated before sending them from one side to the other.

The E46 combines those buses. This can lead to some interesting interactions - one of the most bizarre I've personally seen is a test build of the StealthOne software lowering the climate control fan speed one notch each time a radar alert was reported.
Did they outsource this job to Microsoft or something?
Worse - it is outsourced to over half a dozen vendors for the stereo system alone. All of which are using a single bidirectional bus for all of their communication, and a crash of any one module can lock up the bus.

These modules interact with others in very subtle ways. I have a USB interface on my I-bus, and one of the most puzzling ones is an extended 3-way conversation between the transmission, seat / mirror memory and the TV tuner on startup. That discussion is to see if there is a rear view camera installed.

I probably have the most I-bus crap of anybody (PhatBox, StealthOne, TV tuner, Bluetooth, Sirius in addition to all of the standard nav stuff) and I've only had one lockup where I've needed to power cycle the car to clear it. The StealthOne generates more bus traffic than the PhatBox converter can handle, but that converter politely reboots and doesn't hang the bus - all that happens is the CD changer drops offline for a minute or so and the stereo switches to the previously-selected audio source. I was going to fix this (and a problem where the adapter doesn't pass the Pause signal to the CD changer when audio is muted by the phone) for Blitzsafe, but we couldn't agree on terms.

[ZBB]

I've posted before about something similar happening to my wife in her MINI. Just happened once, when the car was about a month old (and I'm almost certain that was before we added the Blitzsafe audio-in adapter, so there were no aftermarket electronics in the car).

When it happened to her, the engine shut off also, but she was able to throw the clutch in and get it restarted before slowing down much. But everything else appeared as if the battery had been removed for a few seconds -- all settings and counters had been reset, like trip mileage, radio stations, etc...

[equ]

After I put the icelink in, my e46 did a couple of weird things. The nav screen kept a faint glow even when the car was turned off. The old e39 was the only bmw I've had with zero electrical/sensor issues.